Who killed Miss America?

Saturday

Jan 30, 2010 at 12:16 AMJan 30, 2010 at 12:19 AM

Should the Miss America Pageant (8 p.m., Saturday, TLC) be put out of its misery? If there's anything worse than a world without Miss America, it's a world where the once beloved and highly rated contest has been reduced to buzz-free irrelevance, little more than a promotional opportunity for a Las Vegas hotel and a chance for Mario Lopez to host his 4,000th cable special.

Kevin McDonough

Should the Miss America Pageant (8 p.m., Saturday, TLC) be put out of its misery? If there's anything worse than a world without Miss America, it's a world where the once beloved and highly rated contest has been reduced to buzz-free irrelevance, little more than a promotional opportunity for a Las Vegas hotel and a chance for Mario Lopez to host his 4,000th cable special.

It would be easy to blame changing attitudes for the pageant's decline. A feminist march on Atlantic City in 1968 was seen as one of the opening salvos of the modern women's movement. Some contend that Miss America has never recovered.

But why has it withered when other spectacles (Like Donald Trump's glitzier Miss USA and Miss Universe) endure? There are simply more pageants (and more cable shows catering to contestants, parents and coaches) than ever.

Perhaps Miss America has waned because it has tried to remain above the fray and in the middle of the road in an entertainment universe where the center cannot hold.

Pageant culture and its appreciation is divided between true believers -- those who devote their lives and fortunes to tiaras -- and those who treat the whole spectacle as a camp riot and a chance for irony-drenched snark. The two worlds collided and exploded last April when the caustic online gossip columnist Perez Hilton served as a Miss USA judge and posed a loaded question to the infamously witless Carrie Prejean. The rest, as they say, is tabloid history.

In trying to navigate these vulgar extremes, Miss America has become a lukewarm glass of flat soda that not even Mario Lopez can effervesce. It's sad to say that Miss America is fading fast and is likely to expire, not with a bang, but a whimper.

-- Cinderella meets Cyrano in a fat suit in the TV movie "Lying to be Perfect" (9 p.m., Saturday, Lifetime, TV-PG). Poppy Montgomery stars as a full-figured editor at a women's magazine rendered invisible by her avoirdupois and doormat personality.

A potentially pleasant story is all but ruined by strident and unbelievable you-go-girl dialogue and logical lapses and plot holes large enough to drive a Hummer through. It's the kind of Lifetime movie that gives Lifetime movies a bad name.

-- The "Nature" (8 p.m., Sunday, PBS, check local listings) presentation "Wild Balkans" offers a different take on a war-torn region, and along the way tries to redeem the Balkans from its place in both history and the popular imagination.

A blood-soaked battleground ravaged by Christian crusaders and Ottoman occupiers, the Balkan have remained a place of bloodshed as late as the civil wars of the 1990s. "Wild Balkans" puts the emphasis on its natural treasures. Home to ragged mountains and some of the oldest forests and most pristine wetlands in Europe, it endures as an alluring if spooky backwater, a place where wild wolves, brown bears and the continent's few remaining mountain Lynx still roam unmolested.

The narration offers conjecture that J.R.R. Tolkien may have been inspired by the rugged mountains and forests of Bulgaria, Montenegro and Croatia when he created his "Lord of the Rings" novels, set in a mythical Middle Earth.

The film makes much of the "Rings" comparison, offering lavish scenery both haunting beautiful -- all without the benefit of computer graphics or special effects.

-- The NFL deserves congratulations for moving the Pro Bowl (7:20 p.m., Sunday, ESPN) to the week before the Super Bowl, a time when interest in the game remains red hot.

This chance for the best players in the AFC and NFC to play for bragging rights used to be consigned to the week after the big game, when potential viewers have long since been exhausted by Super Bowl ballyhoo. Marketing the Pro Bowl after the Super Bowl is a little like selling champagne on Jan. 2.

For obvious reasons, players from the Super Bowl-bound Colts and Saints will not participate. But interest in the game should run high. Football has been a ratings tear during a season when every network has seen declines. Last week's NFC championship was a real treat for fans and Fox alike. A close, high-scoring shootout that ended in a tie that had to be settled in sudden death overtime, the Saints-Vikings contest attracted more than 50 million viewers at some point during the game. Not even "American Idol" can say that.

-- Sometimes what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas -- and then has to be explained before a judge. That's the point of "Las Vegas Jailhouse" (10 p.m., Sunday, Tru TV), a "Cops"-like documentary series both riveting and depressing in equal measure.

"Jailhouse" unfolds without narration, offering glimpses of the recently arrested who react to their plight with wildly varying degrees of cooperation. A couple brought in for conspiring to steal a purebred Maltese simply can't keep their hands off each other and retire to the lavatory for a pretrial conjugal "visit."

In contrast to these randy amateurs, the best-behaved people appear to be those most familiar with the proceedings -- professional prostitutes with long rap sheets who see jail time as a chance for rest, relaxation and detox.

As on "Cops," the real heroes here are the police officers and jail employees, bureaucrats just doing their job in a catch basin of human excess, inebriation and delusion. One young, pretty officer can't be older than 25 and couldn't be more empathetic. She takes a special interest in a woman who claims to be a reformed prostitute who also says she's given up her crack habit. She's recently discovered that she's six months pregnant and wants to emphasize other priorities.